This dissertation examines jury nullification - the ability of American juries in particular criminal cases to ignore or override valid law to be applied to defendants by acquitting them in cases in which the facts are undisputed or clear - as an exercise of sovereignty over the friend-enemy distinction as those terms are defined by Carl Schmitt. It begins with a biography of Schmitt and a description of his concept of sovereignty as ultimate decisional power. It then discusses sovereignty in the American context, with particular attention to the principles of the Founding and the nature of the fictively constructed American people. It next applies Schmitt's concept of decisional sovereignty to the American context, concluding that sovereignty in America is diffuse, and its exercise by particular governmental actors is to some degree cloaked, and that the sovereignty of the American people, while crucial to the founding moment, is largely latent in ordinary times. This application of Schmitt to sovereignty in America also demonstrates the deep tension between democratic popular sovereignty and rule-of-law liberalism. The dissertation then turns to Schmitt's understanding of the distinction between friend and enemy as the central political axis, and argues that the criminal in the American context is functionally the enemy, if not the absolute enemy of the polity. It then discusses in detail the mechanics and history of jury nullification, ultimately concluding that jury nullification both operates at the crucial political moment at which enemies are generated (or not) through the application of criminal law to defendants, and is an act of popular sovereignty, intended by the Founders to help preserve a balance between democracy and liberalism by maintaining a central political role for the people.

In the tradition of legal pluralism, I explore the various notions of a right influenced by claims on little bits of contingent space. As a consequence of this territoriality, the municipal regulation of and local politics surrounding parking spaces produce competing notions of legality. The jurisprudence of the parking space examines a type of governing that is local and often contested. In spaces where formal law is evident, yet dominantly absent, social law become judge and jury. Right and its regulation are culturally dependent and politically malleable. The right to park is a special right, considered to be a presumption of expectation connected, literally, to a person driving a car and lines on the pavement. Jurisprudentially, this special right is enacted between individuals in everyday parking environments where often the social norm operates as 'the law.' In many cases, formal law is distanced. Feeding the meter manages the threat of a ticket. The appeal of a ticket is the pronouncement of right. Yelling angrily at a driver who parks triumphantly in a coveted space is a noisy but weak attempt to assert a right. The fundamental issues that I explore in the project involve the hybridization of right, identity, and property. My study of the parking space is complex, as I consider the semiotics of the terrain, the embodiment of jurisdiction, and expertise as governance as factors of legitimacy focused on the visibility of who is parking. This notion of belonging is central to the frameworks of community and citizenship in which parking spaces become site of politically constructed architecture. These sites are policed officially by the sexualized authority of parking enforcement and unofficially (and often violently) by other parkers. In this way, law is personified, with the administration of authority inviting closer scrutiny into the nature of constitutive legal theory. At both the level of the United States Supreme Court and in the everyday parking area, the parking space engenders disputes over equal protection guarantees, acts of free speech, and assertions of reserve that reach beyond the stated scope of policy.

<p> This dissertation develops a normative theory of the American administrative state on the basis of Hegelian and American Progressive political thought. I reconstruct the substantive and procedural commitments of the American state from its intellectual history and institutional development. The basic principle I recover from this history is that the state must make the public sphere politically efficacious. </p><p> I begin by tracing German understandings of the state which heavily influenced certain American Progressives. G.W.F. Hegel, and the German public law scholars who followed in his footsteps, understood the modern state to have an emancipatory function. The public bureaucracy would institute the requirements of freedom through market regulation and social welfare provision. This German Hegelian theory of the state was not, however, democratic. Reflecting the failures of the Revolution of 1848 and the subsequent entrenchment of constitutional monarchy in the German states, Hegelian public law scholars sought only to free individuals from conditions of domination within civil society, not to enable the people as a whole to author the laws that bind them. This amalgam of liberal social aims and authoritarian state structure gave way to a crisis-prone, president-centered regime during the Weimar Republic.</p><p> American Progressives were deeply influenced by the Hegelian political thought, but they radically revised this German conception of statehood by democratizing it. W.E.B. Du Bois, Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Mary Parker Follett, and Frank Goodnow each engaged with German Hegelian thinkers in their efforts to imagine and legitimate bureaucratic institutions that would be appropriate for the American democratic context. Like Hegel, they defended administrative efforts to promote individual freedom. But they departed from the German tradition in emphasizing that administration must be rooted in popular sovereignty. The Hegelian Progressive theory that emerges from these writers has two normative requirements: The state must furnish the material and social requisites for individual and collective autonomy, and it must use participatory forms of administration to deliver these requisites. </p><p> This Progressive conception of democratic statehood provides a coherent perspective from which to assess and critique the legitimacy of our contemporary political order. The state's substantive aim should be to protect individual and collective autonomy against the unequal circulation of information and power in civil society. The state should carry out this aim procedurally through the "discursive separation of powers," which treats each branch of the federal government as an approximate institutionalization of the public. The political branches&mdash;the executive and the legislature&mdash;have only a qualified claim to represent the popular sovereign, because they lack complete information about the problems members of the public perceive. Their qualified authority must therefore be augmented through deliberative forms of administration, which bring the people back into the policy-making process when laws are implemented. The judicial branch must police this process to ensure that administrative agencies recognize the "public rights" which are established by statutory law and rooted in public discourse.</p><p> To demonstrate how this Progressive conception of the state functions in practice, I turn to the New Deal and the Civil Rights Revolution. New Deal agricultural agencies partially realized Progressive ideals through subsidies for marginal farmers and participatory forms of land-use planning. These reforms wrought social changes which contributed to the formation of the civil rights movement. I then show how administrative agencies in the War on Poverty furthered radical forms of participatory governance, while civil rights agencies operationalized the discursive separation of powers in combatting segregation.</p><p> Our contemporary state continues to follow this Progressive vision in many respects, but serious problems remain: affected parties do not participate equally in the administrative process; the president sometimes supplants broad public discourse with unilateral executive action; courts and agencies often deploy a technocratic mode of analysis that fails to foster ethical judgment by administrators and value-based argument with the affected public. Despite these institutional failures, the Progressive theory continues to provide a normatively attractive vision for administrative legitimacy. It avoids the narrow economistic reasoning of cost-benefits analysis and the unstable politics of plebiscitary democracy. This theory helps us to separate illegitimate from legitimate exercises of state power in the present, on topics ranging from climate change to immigration reform. By recovering the ethical content of the institutions that have evolved from Progressive political thought, we may better realize the democratic forms and functions of our state.</p>

<p>Personal conflicts of interest among contractor employees are an increasingly visible and controversial area of U.S. Government contracting, given the U.S. Government&rsquo;s expanded reliance on contractor personnel. On November 2, 2011, the FAR Council issued a final rule on preventing personal conflicts of interest for contractor employees performing acquisition functions and issued a request for information regarding whether other privately contracted services in addition to acquisition support present sufficient risk to the integrity of the U.S. Government procurement process to warrant additional regulation. </p><p> This paper will review the defects in the new rule; will evaluate what lessons can be learned from the new rule to enhance future rules governing the personal conflicts of interest of U.S. Government contractors&rsquo; employees; and recommend better integration of U.S. Government compliance regulations to include conflicts of interest rules, protection of proprietary information, and the mandatory disclosure rule to reduce contractor compliance cost and promote implementation efficiencies through integration. </p>

<p> Since 2002, the United States has been conducting drone strikes as an integral part of its war on terror against al Qaeda. This paper discusses the evolution of that practice and considers the legal implications of the targeted killing of alleged members of al Qaeda and its affiliate organizations in non-battlefield situations. It argues that the U.S. is negatively influencing international law at a time when the law is unsettled with regard to non-battlefield targeting of members of armed opposition groups. Further, some of the strikes conducted by the U.S. violate the principles of distinction, proportionality and military necessity. The paper suggests that the U.S. should alter its course of actions, support a more restrained view of the boundaries of targeted killing, and limit any targeted killings to high-level members of terrorist organizations.</p>

Literature on legislatures in developing countries shows two opposing views on their effectiveness and efficiency. In the light of these views, this study chronicles the rise of the GCC States' assemblies, focusing on their role, structure, legitimacy and mechanism, as well as their relevance and contributions to the GCC States' political system. Studying national assemblies is important for understanding the GCC democratic experience, in which the assemblies played a pivotal and positive role. This study leads to the conclusion that despite the fact that the constitutional framework of the GCC States imposes limitations on the functions of the assemblies, they laid the groundwork for institutionalising the legitimacy of the political system of the GCC States, allowing room for various groups to participate in the policy process. Indeed, the GCC parliamentary experience can be appreciated when it is viewed as part of a political system aimed to reduce GCC State's vulnerability and contain external and internal threat. However, viewing the experience in the context of the Islamic teaching and from the perspective of Western democratic principles, the relevance and contribution of the GCC States' legislatures is not only elusive and intangible, but insignificant and undemocratic.

Thesis (J.S.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1975. Adviser: Thomas S. Ulen. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 349-370) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (J.S.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Lawrence B. Solum. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 179-216) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Philosophy, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

<p> During the Civil War, twenty northern states changed their laws to permit absent soldiers to vote. Before enactment of these statutes, state laws had tethered balloting to the voter's community and required in-person participation by voters. Under the new laws, eligible voters &ndash; as long as they were soldiers &ndash; could cast ballots in distant military encampments, far from their neighbors and community leaders. This dissertation examines the legal conflicts that arose from this phenomenon and the political causes underlying it. Legally, the laws represented an abrupt change, contrary to earlier scholarship viewing them as culminating a gradual process of relaxing residency rules in the antebellum period. In fact, the laws left intact all prewar suffrage qualifications, including residency requirements. Their radicalism lay not in changing rules about who could vote, but in departing from the prewar legal blueprint of what elections were and how voters participated in them. The changes were constitutionally problematic, generating court challenges in some states and constitutional amendments in others. Ohio's experience offers a case study demonstrating the radicalism of the legal change and the constitutional tension it created. In political history, prior scholarship has largely overlooked the role the issue of soldier voting played in competition for civilian votes. The politics of 1863-1864 drew soldiers into partisan messaging, since servicemen spoke with authority on the themes the parties used to attack their opponents: the candidates' military incompetence, Lincoln's neglect of the troops, and McClellan's cowardice and disloyalty. Soldiers participated politically not only as voters, but also as spokesmen for these messages to civilian voters. In this setting, the soldier-voting issue became a battleground in partisan efforts to show kinship with soldiers. The issue's potency became evident nationally after the 1863 Pennsylvania gubernatorial race, presaging the 1864 presidential contest. The Republican incumbent ran as "the soldiers' friend" and attacked his Democratic rival as the enemy of soldiers for opposing that state's soldier-voting law. The issue was decisive in securing civilian votes for the victorious Republican. That experience launched a nationwide push by Republicans to enact soldier-voting laws in time for the 1864 elections.</p>